I'm schizoaffective (bipolar type) with autism and PTSD. I know psychological afflictions well. It's good you have an art to express, even if not directly. Just tinkering with the concepts can unveil new perspectives and allow you to safely return to bad memories and process the energy and emotions stored within them. 

If I may make a suggestion: start getting up a little earlier than you're used to and immediately jumping into writing a 1-2k word stream of consciousness. Don't worry about what you create; just spit out everything that comes to mind. This is an exercise which will put you in tune with your unconscious mind and allow you to see yourself in a more objective light. It's also a really good writing exercise; if you do this long enough your ability to just shoot goodness from your hip will improve drastically, as this exercise will grow new neural connections and improve your voice, or that part of your inner narrator that is responsible for reflecting what's inside you pur

As someone who was once in the army but never deployed due to disability, I think you captured what war does to a young mind being sent into it for the first time. I saw how friends completely changed to become "denser," to mean they weren't effected by the same things they were before. I think you captured this perfectly in your statements about a deaf nose and insensitive ears. War is war, and hell is hell, and of the two war is far worse, because only sinners go to hell, while the innocent are flung into war with a dire frequency. You do a good job touching on this. I would have liked to read more, maybe a couple more sets of lines in this style, each detailing some other factor that shows how these men are now dogs of war. As of now, it feels a little shallow for a subject as brazenly hellish as this one. Explore the dense jungle that is the human condition as we meanders through chaos, don't just take the tourboat around the edges! I think you could make something truly marvelous 


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Meandering Through Chaos